Future Salon

Bruce Sterling is Brilliant

I am a bit bummed that I saw too late Mark Lennard's post that Bruce is doing a lecture in the Bay Area. (Mark, how was it?) I saw him once at the Long Now when he was talking about Singularity. He was speculating whether instead of at the dawn of something big like Singularity we are experiencing Technobesity a glut of technology that we are less and less capable to absorb.

In the new scientist he just published a short story:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google
It is written out of the perspective of a teenager in the year 2026. Excellent observations of where a couple of trends probably will lead us:

Global Guerillas strike in London?

Update: Some say it was only a tanker driver that flipped a cut out switch ... (May be the sky is not falling. Sorry.)

One of the sites that I am following, always with a little knot in my stomach is Global Guerrillas by fellow Futurist and friend John Robb. He is a military trained fighter pilot and has lead start-ups to success, which probably is the reason for his contrarian viewpoint.

He has excellent insights and writes sharp analysis about the current terrorist threat and mode of operation. Example: 4GW -- Fourth Generation Warfare; CASCADING SYSTEM FAILURE

When I heard about the London Blast today I immediately thought that this fits into John's systems disruption scenario:

It consists of simple attacks (using ad hoc weapons) on critical nodes of infrastructure -- oil, gas, electricity, water, etc. These attacks, if properly targeted, can cause cascades of failure that sweep entire systems.

Is this the start of such a tactic in Europe? Here John's post from today (attention European notation of date DD/MM/YY or is it military date?):

7/12/05: Zawahiri video posted to the Internet: "I call on the holy warriors to concentrate their campaigns on the stolen oil of the Muslims, most of the revenues of which go to the enemies of Islam. The enemies of Islam are exploiting such vital resources with incomparable greed, and we have to stop that theft with all we can and save this fortune for the nation of Islam."

11/12/05: The Bruncefield Total/Texaco oil depot northwest of London exploded. The explosion was so intense, there is very little likelihood that any cause will be found. 400 tankers offload everyday at the facility which stores 4 million[*] gallons of gasoline, diesel, kerosine, and aviation fuel. As one of the top 5 facilities in the UK, it supplies 5% of the country's energy needs.

Currently the media claims it was an accident, and I so hope that they are right. It looks like some concerted effort is in place to keep the story on low profile. How would you otherwise explain that, although this is the biggest explosion in peacetime Europe, and the fire is still burning, probably with toxic gases all around, the front pages on BBC, CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post barely if at all mention it? I made some screen shots. 

High time to get John Robb over here for a global guerillas Future Salon :-)

[*] The BBC as well as the International Herald Tribune state that there may have been 60 Million Gallons of gasoline involved in the fire.

Above Picture  shot by Gridlock and posted on Flickr with Creative Commons license. There are other beautiful ones, but they marked them all rights reserved, so I don't even link to them :-)

7/12/05: Zawahiri video posted to the Internet: "I call on the holy warriors to concentrate their campaigns on the stolen oil of the Muslims, most of the revenues of which go to the enemies of Islam. The enemies of Islam are exploiting such vital resources with incomparable greed, and we have to stop that theft with all we can and save this fortune for the nation of Islam."

11/12/05: The Bruncefield Total/Texaco oil depot northwest of London exploded. The explosion was so intense, there is very little likelihood that any cause will be found. 400 tankers offload everyday at the facility which stores 4 million[*] gallons of gasoline, diesel, kerosine, and aviation fuel. As one of the top 5 facilities in the UK, it supplies 5% of the country's energy needs.

Currently the media claims it was an accident, and I so hope that they are right. It looks like some concerted effort is in place to keep the story on low profile. How would you otherwise explain that, although this is the biggest explosion in peacetime Europe, and the fire is still burning, probably with toxic gases all around, the front pages on BBC, CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post barely if at all mention it? I made some screen shots. 

High time to get John Robb over here for a global guerillas Future Salon :-)

[*] The BBC as well as the International Herald Tribune state that there may have been 60 Million Gallons of gasoline involved in the fire.

Above Picture  shot by Gridlock and posted on Flickr with Creative Commons license. There are other beautiful ones, but they marked them all rights reserved, so I don't even link to them :-)

Changing Politics is Hard

Micha Sifry was the eCampaign manager for Andrew Rasiej bid to become the number two man in New York politics: Public Advocate. They run an open source political campaign:

We had three over-arching goals for this campaign:
1) that we could push into the public debate some big new ideas about reinventing municipal government, fostering civic engagement, and the value of getting everyone an affordable highspeed Internet connection;
2) that the right way to run for office is to be as open, transparent, people-centered, small-donor-based and network-driven as possible (building on the experiences of various 2004 campaigns); and
3) that reform-minded individuals, groups, writers, editorialists, bloggers, and institutions, along with locally-focused civic activists, would find all of this refreshing and inspiring and they would rally to our banner and help amplify our message.

This is where the potential of new technology lies and where also some of my hopes for positive change are rooted. Unfortunately they didn't manifest this time and Micha Sifry has an excellent post mortem sharing his perspective.

The Next Five U.S. Disasters & The Future of Disaster Relief

We're not sure that anyone used these exact words, but it cannot be denied that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans, the overriding attitude from the scientific community was "We told you so."

Which made us wonder: What other natural disaster do scientists know are coming that we will all pretend we knew were coming, too? If you answered, "Major California earthquake," you're wrong. Even the illiterate know that California will one day be an uninhabited island visible only from the beaches of Utah.

We wanted to dig deeper....[The story gets more serious and outlines possible scenarios for next five U.S. natural disasters.] - "The Next Five Disasters", The Wave Magazine, Oct 5-18, 2005

Before we get to the list of U.S. disasters waiting to happen, I'd like to point you to the Recovery 2.0 Wiki which is meant to prepare in advance for the next disaster in terms of web & internet & tech infrastructure. Instead of scrambling to get fundraising and disaster relief wikis and people finders up after an event, why not plan ahead?

Maybe even ways to disseminate information quickly as a disaster strikes to save lives (personal experience: even five minutes would have saved many thousands of lives this past Dec 26th). Even if that's simply SMS. For instance (yeah, I know this isn't totally feasible in US), "the Shanghai city government issued a text message to mobile telephones late on Sunday" warning residents of the impending deadly typhoon recently. Ideas? Contribute at recovery2.org. Also keep an eye also on Jeff Jarvis' blog for Recovery 2.0 and Technorati tags recovery2.0 and recovery2.

And we're meeting tonight face-to-face in S.F. 6 p.m.

Ok, the list rolls on...

• Area: Pacific Northwest Event: Mount Rainer awakens
• Area: Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas Event: Downtown tornado cluster
• Area: Eastern seaboard  Event: Mega-Landslide/Tsunami [Since this one wasn't so obvious, I've included a snippet:]

Every seismologist and geologist  is familiar with the mega-landslides that have  taken place on the sides of volcanoes over the past 20 million years...

A mega-landslide off the Canary Islands, which [research geophysicist Dr. Stephen N.] Ward calls "one of the steepest places on earth," would result in a wave that is still more than 100 feet tall when it hits the eastern seaboard of the United States.

• Area: Boulder, Colorado Event: Flash Flood
• Area: Entire U.S. Event: Avian Flu Pandemic

(Source: "The Next Five Disasters", The Wave Magazine, Oct 5-18, 2005, not online as yet, but this should be URL next week for Vol 5, Issue 20)

I'm seeing more and more about this flu in the news. There's fear that if the virus mutates then human-to-human transmission could make this flu pandemic worse than the 1918 outbreak of H1N1, which killed 500,000 Americans and 50 million people worldwide.

Check out the October feature story in National Geographic is: The Next Killer Flu.

"The administration has failed to prepare adequately for a flu pandemic," said Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "The danger of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was ignored until it was too late. We can't make the same mistake with pandemic flu." - "Bird flu preparation goes global", The New York Times, The Associated Press, Reuters, October 6, 2005

Read more about how we're preparing for the possibility of the bird flu and what scientists are doing with genetic studies including combing for the ancient 1918 virus from autopsy tissue and even flying to Alaska to dig up a mass grave buried in permafrost.

tags recovery2.0 recovery2 natural disaster disaster relief

Great Stem Cell Overview

Wow, that was an excellent presentation by Christoper Scott last night. Stem Cells is a complex issue from so many angels: Biology, politics, science, potential health benefits, moral issues, economics, international competition, ... Chris super cool and with loots of dry humor made the topic very accessible and kept us captivated throughout the presentation.

Things I learned last night in no particular order:

Douple Your Chances to Die: Drive an SUV

It's not that you will get hit by an Earth First activist for driving an SUV (Although it would be good if reason would hit SUV drivers soon :-)

No, 'upgrade' from a Jetta/Golf to a Toyota 4Runner and your chances of dying in an an accident just doubled from 37 per million Jettas to 94 per million 4Runners. Oh, and if you love your child, please get a minivan for a third of the 4Runner fatalities only 31 per million Chrysler Town & Country.

Don't believe me, then read Big and Bad last year's excellent New Yorker Article by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a real eye opener regarding building and buying for perceived safety versus real safety and why we fall for it.

Malcolm just brought out a new book Blink. The power of thinking without thinking. Currently on top of Technorati's book list. Salon has a review. There is also the showdown between him and the Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki in Slate [via Evelyn].

Malcolm is on tour in the Bay Area right now. Check it out. I think I will try the lunch Stanford Bookstore session on Wednesday, which is quite close to SAP. See you there.

What is wrong with TV News?

On my way home today I was listening to NPR's Cleveland City Club Forum with Av Westin presenting: What is Wrong with Television News?

He sees politicization, as some call it foxification, as the worst trend in network news. "The reporter being visibly appalled when hearing an opposing opinion." Av stressed, that his is not talking about the opinion journals like the Bill O'Reilly show, which was the first face that came to my mind when I heard this.

The reason behind it is not a conspiracy, but quite simple the ratings game. If you ask the American populace they are about evenly divided into 40% that call themselves conservative and 40% on the liberal side and 20% that don't want to be put in either of these boxes.

David Brin Vs. Brad Templeton; Broadband Activist Dewayne Hendricks Wires the Developing World, & More in the Newest Tech Tidbits

The Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change puts out a weekly newsletter called Tech Tidbits. You can check out this week's edition here. It includes a description of an upcoming debate between physicist-author David Brin and EFF chairman Brad Templeton at Accelerating Change 2004: Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface. The topic of that debate is "The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?" and Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson technology venture capital firm, will moderate. This week's edition also spotlights broadband activist (yes indeed) Dewayne Hendricks, President of the Dandin Group, who's working to bring state-of-the-art networks to underdeveloped areas like the Country of Tonga and American Indian reservations. Exciting, hopeful stuff. Dewayne will also be speaking at Accelerating Change.

Sign up to receive Tech Tidbits (weekly) and/or Accelerating Times (ISAC's lengthier, quarterly newsletter)

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ISAC is also looking for story submissions. If you'd like to submit an article or write-up for Tech Tidbits or Accelerating Times please email me at jerrypaffendorf(at)accelerating(dot)org.

The Cryptic Prophecies of Jeff Goldblum Applied to Massively Multiplayer Video Games...In a Good Way, of Course

Massively multiplayer online games (MOGs) come in many shapes and sizes, from EverQuest to City of Heroes to Second Life to The Sims Online. But no matter how self-contained a MOG is designed to be (it's a sliding scale), these virtual worlds consistently end up coloring outside the lines of simple fun and games.

Like Jurassic Park with avatars instead of dinosaurs, players routinely pour over the designers' intended boundaries and take over the park, at least partially (hat tip to Jeff Goldblum). This really miffs some of the hardcore gamers whose immersion is disturbed by glimpses of the workaday world outside, not to mention those gaming companies that want to put a smackdown on secondary markets for virtual goods.

The whole thing is rather complicated, what with its who's who of legal, creative and ethical issues. What does seem clear is that as the degree of freedom and quality of simulation within digital environments rises, the pressures of real life suggest new capabilities in areas ranging from education to business to rapid prototyping to military training to dating.

The Virtual Space theme of this year's Accelerating Change conference explores the future of reality gaming and massively multiplayer environments by bringing together some of the most savvy and visionary thinkers on the topic of digital worlds which embrace the real world. Will Wright, creator of The Sims, and Cory Ondrejka, Second Life developer, will provide keynote presentations that should not be missed--"Games as Prosthetics for the Imagination" (Will), and "Living the Dream: Business, Community and Innovation at the Dawn of Digital Worlds" (Cory).

Following Will's talk there will be a debate entitled "Real Money in Virtual Economies: The Future of User-Created Content" between Jack Emmert (lead designer of City of Heroes) and Steve Salyer (new President of Internet Gaming Entertainment--the world's largest secondary market for virtual goods and currencies), and including Cory Ondrejka.

Similarly focused speakers include Nova Barlow (online community consultant and forecaster), Robert Gehorsam (There and the Earth military simulation), Keith Halper (Kuma Reality Games), Robin Harper (University participation and learning in Second Life--Wired News article), and Clark Aldrich (Simulation and the Future of Learning).

For more conference information and a full list of speakers go to http://www.accelerating.org/ac2004. Early registration ends on September 30th.

Extreme Democracy Plus Future Salon

It's election time, but of course the Future Salon looks beyond Swift Boats :-) One of the inspirations is the upcoming Extreme Democracy book: "Extreme democracy" is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues."

Another inspiration is The Tao of Democracy by Tom Atlee who has thought about, written and spoken for twenty years on innovations in democracy. Paul H. Ray, Ph.D co-author of The Cultural Creatives sais about his book: What Tom Atlee is writing about is just about the most important thing that's happening at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Over a year ago John Abbe pointed the Future Salon in his direction by posting links to chapers of his book. There for the first time I got introduced to the excellent concept of citizen deliberative councils.

Third inspiration are the tool makers, like the volunteers that created the DeanSpace and now are knitting CivicSpace, an open-source grassroots organizing web-application toolkit .

The beauty is, that on Thursday the 16th of September we bring these three rays of hope together and let them shine at the Future Salon.

Transparent Society Update

In July 2002 one of the earliest books we covert at a Future Salon was David Brin's Transparent Society He has just written the cover story for Salon Magazine [free day-pass] in August of this year: Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!

He makes the case that the surveillance technologies are so plentiful, that it is no use fighting it. It is a tide, that you may slow down, but not stop. What we should focus on is to make sure it goes both ways:

Each time the lesson is the same one: that professionals should attend to their professionalism, or else the citizens and consumers who pay their wages will find out and -- eventually -- hold them accountable.

I am not so sure about this. Take for example Prison Rape. It is a long known fact that these horrors are going on in the prisons on a daily basis. So we have found out about it, but we are not really holding anyone accountable do we?

Voting via Floating

I almost overlooked our friends in San Diego had an interesting session this month about Seasteading.

Land is taken, let's create land on the sea. In modular structures, that can be linked together to form a community. Advantage: If you don't like the politics or gasp the taxes of your current society, you pull up your seastead and float it over to where the sea is greener.

Amp without Guitar

Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower

"When journalists don't cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar - they have no signal to reinforce."

Great post about the whole world, journalism, emerging democracy and social software. Read it.

Reminder Tomorrow Future Salon: Why We Play Games: Gaming Beyond Games

Not all is fun and games ...

There are also the darker sides of more and more people playing more and more online games. Everquest Daily Grind is a blog with personal accounts of people with partners or parents that are addicted to Multi Player Online Games. These tails are quite chilling:

For 2 months now my fiance has not stopped playing EQ for more than 10 minutes unless he is sleeping or at work! And he only stops playing to sleep for a couple hours. So he plays at the very least 8 hours through the week and ALL weekend. We have 4 kids (3 are his, 1 is mine) and are having another in less than 2 weeks. I am the ONLY one who has done EVERYTHING that needs done around the house and for the kids! He doesn't usually even answer when any of us speak to him!

Tomorrow mainly the sunny sides of "Why We Play Games: Gaming Beyond Games" at the Future Salon: Friday the 21st of May from 7-9pm (Join us for dinner afterwards too.)

Attention: Because swissnex is connected to the Swiss Consulate you need to Register for the event. They promised to only use this information for security.

Location: 730 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 [map] T: (415) 912-5901

More details to the content of this week's Future Salon in this post.

Americans Playing More Games, Watching Less Television

Americans Playing More Games, Watching Less Television

Specifically, 52 percent of gamers who are spending more time playing games report watching less television as a result, 47 percent go to movies less, and 41 percent watch movies at home less often.

"What we’re seeing is that consumers are choosing video and computer games as their choice of entertainment for the 21st century," said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the ESA

Stumbled over these statistics by visiting the collaborative virtual world analyst blog Terra Nova.

There are some really interesting stories out there. It is a good preparation for our Friday Future Salon: Why We Play Games: Gaming Beyond Games

So What Is The Future Salon Anyway?

Last night, at the Emerging Technology SIG, I did what I usually do, and babbled on about the events in the Bay Area that are interesting to me. And, of course, I mentioned that people who are interested in the Emerging Technology SIG might also be interested in the Future Salon (cross-pollination is a good thing. And I'm very happy that DJ Cline, who I first met at a future salon, is now coming to the Emerging Technology SIG on a regular basis).

But I got asked: What is the Future Salon? And I fum-fummed around a bit, and did my best to explain the underlying thematic consistency of a group that ranges from a discussion of world-changing to Jaron Lanier's latest thoughts. But. Although I might have been more articulate, it felt like I was saying "Dude. We meet and talk about the future. Well, some parts of it anyway."

So I fell back on describing the future salon in terms of its differences from the Emerging Technology SIG. Which worked last night, but won't work in general.

All of which leads to the deep question: how do you describe the future salon to people?

Social Network Hunt is On

Danah Boyd got robbed at a SXSW party. Now we have a picture of the robber (to the right)[more pictures].

It is quite weird to see this cristal clear picture of him half smiling. My prediction is that it is only a matter of time until someone recognizes him and brings him to justice. (Or so I hope)

We talked about that at the dinner after the last Future Salon: Privacy is gone, but if the robber is coughed it would clearly show a positive side of it.

The Social Network hunt is on. Tell all your friends in Austin. Craigslist post here. Developing.

Awesome Salon Last Night

Last night's salon, a discussion led by the fine folks at worldchanging, was fascinating.

To me it was interesting because a lot of the things that were said, I've said in the past. And yet, somehow, at the ripe old age of 36, I've become much less trusting of the ideas of "problems" and "solutions." Somehow, along the way, I became sort of libertarian. Or, as I articulated it later on, "I became a mathematician and learned to distrust pure reason. I became a manager and learned to distrust centralized solutions and hierarchical control." And so I sat there, listening, and taking notes, and thinking "But what you're doing is describing the emergence of new products on a market, not a drastic problem that we must take action to solve."

And then I began to think harder. I still don't think they identified real problems that have to be solved (or, rather, I think the existing mechanisms could solve the problems just fine, and that, in fact, the examples they cited were examples of problems already identified and in the process of being solved). But I'm also starting to muse over thinkcycle -- that feels like something with the potential to transform the way we do things. Collaborative design, done at a distance and over the internet. For things other than software.

In the discussions afterwards, I learned a lot about Steve Jackson games, and what writers do to survive. Good to know.

Revolution 2.0 is out in Beta

Trippi this morning at the Emerging Technology Tech-In:

The broadcast media let us down in the last years. (David Weinberger calls it the real echo chamber.)

The first revolution was in the 17hundreds and the Dean campaign is the beta version of Revolution 2.0. We are only at the beginning of this.

I was sitting between David Weinberger and Jon Lebkowsky who were life blogging and doing a much better job at that then me.

For a brief moment if you searched for Trippi at Google News, you would get a reference to Jon's blog. (Currently 9.30pm you still do, but just in case I did a screenshot.)

The revolution will not be televised. It will be streamed.

O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In is one of the most interesting events this year at the Emerging Technology Conference and it will be streamed, so you can watch/listen in from the far.

If you want to get up to speed where the current discussion is, check these sources:
Exiting Deanspace Clay Shirky
Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign? Clay Shirky
Call for working examples of Emerging Democracy. Ethan Zuckerman and Joe Ito
The real echo chamber David Weinberger (actually everything on the Loose Democracy Blog)
The rising tide the usual insightful and linkfull Doc Searls follow the links there :-)
The great thing is, they are all here in San Diego, Joe Trippy too. It will be really interesting. Can't wait.

Bonus link: Voices without votes who's goal is a dialogue between those who can vote in the 2004 U.S. election and those who cannot.

The Long Now

A couple of years ago I heard a wonderful lecture and slideshow about The Long Now Foundation's 10,000 Year Clock, a high-tech mechanical clock that is designed to not wear out for over 10,000 years, to be installed in Long Mountain near Ely, Nevada. Quoting computer scientist Daniel Hills:

I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

The Long Now Foundation's goal is to change how we think about time:

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries.

It was a fascinating lecture, and made me think deeply.

I just got a note tonight that The Long Now Foundation is sponsoring a series of free seminars on the topic of "Long Term Thinking". The next one is Friday, February 13 and the speaker is James Dewar of RAND, and the topic is "Long Term Policy Analysis", to answer the question "how to improve our ability to think about the longer-range future--from 35 to as far as 200 years ahead."

The free seminar will be held at the Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco at 8pm (7pm coffe bar). Thankfully, this isn't a Future Salon Friday, so I hope to attend.

There is also information on future seminars which include Rusty Schweickart on "The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years", Daniel Jazen on "It's ALL Gardening" and David Rumsey on "Mapping Time".